


and if the sunlight clasps the earth

by erebones



Series: pass through fire [1]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Briarwood Arc, Kissing, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-22
Updated: 2018-04-22
Packaged: 2019-04-26 09:09:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14398860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/erebones/pseuds/erebones
Summary: Percy has some things to say to Vax after the disastrous dinner with the Briarwoods. "You're a fucking idiot," are just a few of them.





	and if the sunlight clasps the earth

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for "Crimson Diplomacy." Born out of a throwaway line of Liam's that I misheard when the gang was coming to the rescue: "My Percy" instead of "Hi Percy." And my brain ran rampant. :P 
> 
> Title from "Love's Philosophy" by (appropriately) Percy Shelley.

“You utter fool.”

Vax startles awake in his chair. The book he fell asleep over slams spine-down against the flagstone floor of his room in Greyskull Keep and he flails upright, trying to orient himself. “What in the bloody—”

Thin streams of afternoon light filter through the semi-transparent curtains, casting faded gold fingers of day across the floor. At the crystalline edges, still subsumed in shadow, stands Percy. Arms folded over his chest, white hair blown in every direction by his forge like an overripe dandelion puff. Glowering.

“H’lo Freddy,” Vax mumbles. He stretches his legs out in front of him like a cat, curling his toes against the shag carpet, and bends down to pick up his book.

Before his fingers even graze the cover, Percy has swooped down and snatched it up, snapping the book closed with a sound like one of his guns going off. Vax winces and rubs one ear as Percy draws himself up, huffy as a spurned peacock.

“Vax, this has to stop.”

“What has to stop?” He yawns widely, shuffling off Percy’s glowering stare like a old cloak. “Sleeping during the day? Because I have to say, old chap, you’re one to talk—”

Percy is suddenly… very close. So close Vax can smell him, the heat and sweat of the forge, the tang of metal, the brack of gunpowder. His glasses are smudged with soot and his sideburns have grown more scraggly than usual, making his face look thin and worn. He looks… _exhausted_.

“Going. Off. Alone. You nearly _died_ , Vax’ildan. You nearly became one of _them_.”

This close, shaded in sunlight, Percy’s eyes seem to glow gold, and for a moment all Vax can see is Lord Briarwood before him, smile curling into smoke. His heart seizes in his chest and he reaches out, fumbling for Percy’s hand and gripping it. Hard. Bent to sincerity by the tang of fear in the back of his throat.

“I know. I know, and I’m sorry. I’ll do better.”

Percy huffs and tries to draw back, but Vax’s grip is too strong. He doesn’t think he could let go now if he tried. “Will you?”

“I will—I will _try_ ,” Vax says. The honesty of it scrapes his tongue a little, like a too-sharp tooth. “Is that enough?”

“I suppose it will have to be.” Caught half-bent over, seized in Vax’s hold, Percy’s shoulders slump and he kneels slowly to the ground. He pushes his glasses up off his nose, into his wild hair. It’s painfully obvious to Vax’s eye that he hasn’t slept since last night’s… encounter. “Are you all right, Vax? Truly?”

“Now he’s concerned,” Vax tries, but Percy has none of it, returning his vise-like grip.

“Of course I’m bloody concerned, why do you think I came in here like I did?”

“I already got it from my sister. I assure you, there’s nothing you can say to me that she hasn’t already drilled into my head.”

Percy’s thin mouth flattens into an unimpressed line, and he glares up at Vax through his lashes. He’s too damned dirty to be this pretty, Vax thinks idly—a fleeting, familiar thought. “Well, maybe it will mean something else, then, coming from me. Something _more_.” Percy’s hand is trembling in his, Vax realized. He loosens his grip and the tremor worsens, but when he tries to pull away Vax only clasps him tighter. “Seeing you… like that,” Percy whispers. “On the ground, all crumpled, and _him_ standing over you…”

The memory of it bites into his flesh like daggers. Like teeth, too sharp, bladed into an eerie parody of a smile. “I thought…” Vax begins, and stops. The time for excuses has long since passed. “I’m sorry, Perce.”

“So you’ve said.” The words are too fraught for levity, though Percy tries. His mouth flickers at the corners, almost a smile, and the pitiful attempt at a brave face hurts worse than his ire. Vax sighs and reaches out with his free hand, carding his fingers through Percy’s white hair. Thumb to the plane of his forehead. Percy’s brow crumples and he bows his head.

“My Percy,” Vax whispers.

Percy leans into him, hard, and makes a wet noise in his throat. “Do you know what I would do,” he says, his voice cracked and splintered like damp wood before the flame. “Do you know what I would have done to them, if they had killed you?”

“Something dreadfully melodramatic, no doubt.”

Percy’s fingers tighten to a painful degree, but Vax doesn’t pull away. He may have deserved that one. “I don’t—I can’t even _conceive—_ ” He breaks off and finds Vax’s other hand in his hair, pulls it down to press it to his mouth. His eyes are wet and red-rimmed, matching the pink flare of his nostrils, but he’s not weeping outright. Not yet. But it’s the closest Vax has ever seen him, and it’s frightening. Percy never cracks. Never. Not before last night. “They destroyed my family once before,” Percy says, and now his voice grates in his chest like old coals raked over the hearth, smokey and black, and a twinge of fear makes itself known in Vax’s breast. “If they tried it again, either they would not survive, or I would not.”

It hurts to hear him say it, but Vax cannot rebuke him. He would do the same, in Percy’s place. Would do it for any of them. Any of his family, which has expanded somehow, when he wasn’t looking, to include a great many wise, brave, reckless idiots. He sighs and rests their foreheads together, cradling Percy’s face in his hands. He can feel unshaven bristle against his palms, smell the sharp, bitter sting of the forge even stronger.

“My Percy,” he says again, and Percy exhales shakily.

“You mean a great deal to me, Vax’ildan. When you are so careless with your own life, it… it frightens me.”

“What a lucky thing, then, that I have you to protect me.” Vax strokes his thumbs along the sharp planes of Percy’s cheekbones. Too thin, too thin. Under his skin is a shadow of the man they exhumed from that prison cell, and Vax swears to himself in silence that he will beat that shadow back and bury it before he sees it devour Percival from within.

“Always,” Percy declares, deadly serious in spite of the slip of his glasses listing down his brow. The sunlight slants across his face as he meets Vax’s eyes, stern as marble, but licked by lively flame. Vax lets his fingertips brush the narrow wire frame of his spectacles and presses them up, over his forehead to nest in his hair again like a strange, featherless bird. Percy blinks myopically at him. “What…?”

“Freddy,” Vax says gently, “may I?”

Like treacle slowly eased beyond its melting point, understanding floods Percy’s face, superseded immediately by shyness. He’s so bloody pale that the slightest flush is a swathe of red across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose, marked on either side by the indents that his spectacles have left behind.

“Of course,” Percy whispers.

Between one breath and the next, their lips find each other. Vax still cradles his face ever so gently, guiding him—there is something, a premonition, a sixth sense, that tells him Freddy is still very much a stranger to physical intimacy. But he’s a quick study. He kneels up, leaning into Vax’s body, and kisses back with clumsy fervor that slowly evens out into long, earnest presses, as if he were drinking deeply and steadily from a pool of clear water. Vax feels the shift and lets it happen, hands falling to Percy’s shoulders and lower, to the garters around his biceps as Percy reaches up Vax’s thighs.

“Freddy,” Vax mumbles against his lips, “you’ve been holding out on me.”

“Too much?” Percy asks, faltering for just a moment, reticent—but Vax reaches around behind him, grabbing fistfuls of shirt and braces, and _pulls_. Percy stumbles up, following the graceless momentum until he’s practically straddling Vax’s lap in the chair. “Er…”

“You’re exquisite,” Vax breathes. It’s very nearly a confession, dredged out of his kiss-numbed lips as he stares cross-eyed into the flushed expanse of Percy’s half-open shirt. _Sweet Sarenrae, did I do that?_

Percy makes a dubious sound but doesn’t protest. Instead he curves one large hand—larger than Vax had ever noticed or anticipated—around the back of Vax’s neck and pulls his mouth up, up…

There is a unique flavor of desperation to their kisses, now, and Vax isn’t quite sure how to pinpoint it. His head is aswirl with shock and fervor at the brilliance of Percival in his lap, of Percy’s hands sliding up Vax’s shirt, of Percy’s tongue breaching shallowly at the seam of his lips every time he pauses to catch his breath. Perhaps it’s the lack of oxygen, then, that finally picks apart the filaments of his hunger and wrests him awake, breaking the kiss to struggle briefly, in vain, against Percy’s weight.

There’s a horrible split second where Percy doesn’t realize—thinks he’s bucking and gyrating for a different reason, made evident by the cocky grin that slices across Percy’s face. Then he meets Vax’s eyes and the smile drops away as he pushes back, off the chair and away, up against the nearest bedpost.

“Vax—”

He gasps for breath, massaging his chest. Gods, what terrible timing. He feels the sad, muted pulse of heat in his groin as his cock gives a pathetic plea, but it’s too late. The distant heat-shimmer of arousal wavers on the horizon and is gone. “Sorry—sorry, sorry,” he stammers. “I don’t know what came over me, I…”

“You’re still recovering,” Percy says quietly. He’s frowning now, in that introspective way he has that makes him look stern and cold; but Vax knows he’s only upset with himself. “I shouldn’t have pushed you.”

“You—there was no _pushing_ , Freddy,” Vax bursts out, indignant. He bolsters himself up from the chair in a rush, as if to prove a point, and his knees wobble traitorously beneath him. “Fucking...”

“I’ve got you. I have you, Vax.” Percy is there suddenly, arms out but not quite touching, and Vax folds into them, hating himself but loving Percy all the more for it. Percy is taller than him by a few measly inches, but they feel insurmountable now as Vax lays his head on Percy’s shoulder and just breathes. “ _My_ _Vax_.”

Vax huffs and tweaks his nose. “That’s my line.”

“This is a two-way street, Vax’ildan.” Percy glowers at him, but he’s a poor excuse for a taskmaster with his hands tender on Vax’s waist and his spectacles sliding down the narrow bridge of his aristocratic nose. Vax leans up, because he can’t help it, and kisses him. Short, sweet. Edged with sorrow. They’ve such a very long way to go before the end, and for a moment Vax feels that weight swell within him, threatening to splinter his ribs from the inside out.

But Percy cups his cheek and kisses back softly, at odds with the vague scrape of callouses where his fingers brush Vax’s jaw, and it’s enough to stem the tide of fear and fury. Vax breathes in, breathes out.

“Freddy.”

“Yes, my dear?”

“Will you lie down with me for a bit? If you’re done being angry with me?”

Percy hums. “I was done being angry a while ago, if I’m honest. Come on.” He guides Vax backward until he can crawl into bed unimpeded. His legs and arms still feel like jelly, but the mattress welcomes him, spreading itself out in invitation as he struggles beneath the covers.

Percy sits on the edge of the bed and fastidiously removes his boots and stockings, unclips his braces and rolls them up to rest them on the bedside table. Vax reaches out and spans his fingers down the length of Percy’s spine where it protrudes beneath the fabric of his shirt.

“You should take this off.”

Percy looks over his shoulder at him. “Vax…”

“What? I’m convalescing, not dead.” Vax wiggles his eyebrows at him. “Please?”

Percy sighs. “Very well. You’re lucky you’re pretty, Vax’ildan.”

Vax smirks and settles into the pillow to watch as Percy strips out of his shirt and climbs into bed. The sun is still streaming through the window, though the brilliant gold of mid-afternoon has begun to bleed away into a muted rose-gold, like the burnished flesh of a peach split open just after peak. It spills over Percy’s shoulders and silhouettes him, a shimmering cloak of daylight as he leans over Vax and brushes a strand of dark hair from his eyes.

“You’re sure you are well?” he asks, voice pitched low with worry.

“I am,” Vax answers confidently. “Or… I will be.”

“And you’ll tell me, or Vex, or any of us, if you feel…”

“You will be the first to know. Or the second. I swear.”

Percy regards him closely, face cast in shadow, and nods. At last, at last, he climbs into bed—his skin is pale as marble but warm under Vax’s hands, sturdy and strong. Beautiful. Vax presses a kiss to the center of his chest, vows to himself that when he wakes, he’ll be steady enough to finish what he started. Then, satisfied, he tucks himself against Percy’s chest like a sparrow seeking shelter in the lee of a weathered, friendly stone wall, and rests.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm super late to the campaign one game, but I'm slowly catching up and the Briarwoods arc was fucking intense and awesome and gave me a lot of perc'ildan feels. I am all for the canon ships, but where's the fun in just sticking to that? So here I am, four years late with Starbucks, back on my rarepair bullshit. Thanks for reading! You can find me at tumblr under the same username, come and say hi if you feel so inclined. <3


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